Who Needs Sleep Anyway?

When we 1st brought Will home from the hospital, we thought we had hit the jackpot. The nurses had gotten him onto a schedule of eating and being changed every 3 hours, which he continued here. We would feed him around 10-11pm before going to bed ourselves, then he would awaken around 1:30am and 4:30am. We did not think this was bad compared to the extremely restless nights we had with Lili! Suddenly, all of this seems to have changed. For the most part, Will still only wants to eat about every 3 hours. We have had a few nights where he ate every 2 hours, but we attributed those to growth spurts or the extreme night munchies. The change has come with where and how he wants to sleep. He no longer finds his crib soothing during the night (though he will still take several naps in it during the day) and his preferences on where to sleep seem to change every day and with every sleep period. Last night he slept in his crib from 10pm-11pm. After his 11pm feeding I tried to put him back in the crib but he soon started screaming. He fell back to sleep in my arms, so I tried it again...once again he started screaming. Eventually he just slept on my chest until his next feeding at 1:00am (last night was one of those nights where he wanted to eat every 2 hours!). From 1:30am until 4:00am he slept in his swing and from 5:00am to 7:00am he slept in our bed. Previously he had seemed to be a pretty deep sleeper and we found it VERY hard to keep him awake...even during a feeding! Now all of a sudden, he is restless and sleeping very lightly. Just when you think you got him into a deep sleep, you find him crying to be held not long after. The strange thing is that he isn't wide-eyed and awake during the night......he just wakes up enough to realize that he doesn't like where he's at and cries for us to come get him. The part that stresses me out is that he isn't consistent about where he DOES like to sleep, so it's not like I know what to do with him next. I happened to Google the issues we are having (I Google EVERYTHING!) with this and found the following information:

Is your preemie an unusually light sleeper? "All infants wake to eat throughout the night," says George Cohen, M.D., editor of the American Academy of Pediatrics' Guide to Your Child's Sleep, "but those who arrive a month or more early have especially tiny tummies, which means they need to refuel more often than full-term newborns -- about every two hours, compared with every three or four." And it's believed that one reason preemies spend most of their snooze time in REM sleep (from which they're easily awakened) is to help their brains develop normally. Rest assured, your baby will settle in time, says Dr. Cohen. Until she does, you can minimize night wakings by responding only when she cries. Other sounds she might make don't necessarily mean something's wrong, or that she's hungry: Since she's close to consciousness in REM sleep, she may be noisier than a full-term baby, who's slumbering more deeply.

My only hope now is that we see him settle down sooner rather than later. Especially since I return to work in about 6 weeks! This poor little guy really has gotten the short end of the stick with everything that has happened!